Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Of note and concern:

It’s a good thing that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is making an effort to reassure India’s diplomats in Canada that her government is taking the latest bloodcurdling threats against them seriously. A good thing, because Canada’s track record on keeping a lid on Khalistani extremism is abysmal, and the Indian government has little reason to trust Canada’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to do their jobs.

The latest threat comes in the form of a pro-Khalistan “Sikhs for Justice” poster advertising an upcoming rally at India’s Toronto consulate featuring photographs of Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and Toronto Consul General Apoorva Srivastava. The poster describes Verma and Srivastava as the “killers” of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia.

The poster comes only a few weeks after Canadian diplomats in India were scrambling with earnest disavowals following a parade in Brampton, Ont., that featured a float with mannequins in a grotesque replication of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

The president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C., Nijjar was gunned down in the temple’s parking lot on June 18. He was closely associated with the Sikhs for Justice group, which has been organizing an international “referendum” on Sikh independence in an independent Khalistan (“land of the pure”) carved out of India’s Punjab state.

While Nijjar’s friends and associates deny his alleged terrorist affinities and claim CSIS had warned him to be careful, Indian police authorities say Nijjar led a group called the Khalistan Tiger Force and was a key figure in Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), the terror-listed entity in Canada that carried out the bombing of an Air India jetliner that fell into the sea off the coast of Ireland in 1985, killing all 329 on board. That atrocity was plotted and planned in Canada under the noses of the RCMP and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.

Nijjar was wanted in India on a variety of criminal charges going back to the bombing of a Hindu temple in the Punjabi city of Patiala in 2010. Punjab police had also issued an arrest warrant for Nijjar on dubious charges that he was plotting the murder of religious leaders, and on the unlikely claim that he was organizing a training camp for Khalistani militants in a rural area near Mission, B.C.

While Punjab’s police authorities are notoriously paranoid about the Khalistani movement, which is almost entirely a phenomenon of diaspora Sikh communities — especially in Canada — Indian authorities have good reason to be concerned about Canada’s determination to keep a lid on a recent upsurge in Khalistani violence.

Khalistani terrorism literally exploded onto the scene in India in the early 1980s, with Canada serving as haven for the separatist movement’s government-in-exile. Babbar Khalsa was perhaps the most bloodthirsty terror group that had holed up in the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar, Sikhism’s Vatican. The organization was commanded by the Air India atrocity mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar from his home in Burnaby, B.C.

The Khalistani movement has undergone a revival in recent years, with Canada again providing a haven for several key figures wanted on terror-related charges in India. On Monday, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar drew attention to the Sikhs for Justice “Killers” poster that singled out Indian diplomats in Canada. “We have requested our partner countries like Canada, U.S., U.K. and Australia where sometimes Khalistani activities happen, not to give space to the Khalistanis. Because their radical, extremist thinking is neither good for us nor them nor our relations.”

Similar posters identifying Indian diplomats in the style of a “wanted” poster and describing Nijjar as a shaheed jathedar (martyred commander) have also turned up in San Francisco and Australia. Last Sunday, a fire was set outside India’s consular offices in San Francisco in an incident condemned by the U.S. State Department on Monday.

In March, during a severe clampdown on separatist agitation in Punjab, Indian embassies were the sites of sometimes violent protests in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Ottawa. The San Francisco consulate was subjected to an arson attack. The fence of the High Commission in London was scaled and an Indian flag was ripped down. In Washington, a journalist was allegedly assaulted, and in Ottawa, “grenades” that turned out to be just smoke bombs were thrown at the High Commission.

Surrey RCMP say they are exploring all leads related to Nijjar’s murder, which took the shape of a typical Surrey gangland hit job — two heavy-set masked men were spotted fleeing the scene and are believed to have absconded in a nearby getaway car. The local Integrated Homicide Investigation Team would not say whether a stolen car found torched a few kilometres away was part of the investigation, but it would be consistent with gangland murders in Metro Vancouver.

Nijjar was known to have been feuding with the former Khalistani militant Ripudaman Singh Malik, the multimillionaire implicated in Babbar Khalsa’s 1985 Air India bombing who was murdered in a hit job in July last year. Malik, who was acquitted on Air India charges, had made his peace with the Indian government and had his name removed from India’s visa blacklist as a result. Malik went on to express support for India’s authoritarian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is wildly unpopular among India’s Sikhs and has become notorious for his civil rights abuses and close relationships with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

The two men charged with first-degree murder in Malik’s shooting have lengthy criminal records and were well known to police agencies keeping tabs on Metro Vancouver’s organized-crime underworld.

While Nijjar’s murder exhibits fairly routine signs of a revenge killing, New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, who has publicly indulged in a conspiracy theory proposing an Indian intelligence-agency plot behind the Air India bombing, has asked Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to look into the case in light of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser’s identification of India as a source of foreign interference in Canada.

This is the sort of thing that gives the Indian government cause to distrust Ottawa’s seriousness in coming to terms with threats to India’s security that come from Canada. As recently as 2018, the convicted former Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Singh Atwal showed up in Trudeau’s entourage in the prime minister’s tour of India, which had already become a public-relations disaster owing to Trudeau’s weird wardrobe choices, and Modi snubbing him for several days before agreeing to meet with him.

The RCMP later conceded that Atwal’s background should have been brought to the prime minister’s attention. Atwal was convicted for his role as the triggerman in the attempted assassination of a visiting Punjabi cabinet minister on a Vancouver Island backroad in 1986. When the controversy blew up, Trudeau’s national security adviser at the time, Daniel Jean, insinuated that the whole affair had been orchestrated by India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.

Maybe Mélanie Joly’s sternly reassuring words about Canada’s duty under the Vienna Convention to protect foreign diplomats in Canada are the sign of a changed attitude in Ottawa. If so, that would be very good news.

Source: Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

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John Ivison: As immigration doubts grow, Poilievre keeps the faith, Lawrence Martin: Canada’s best story might be immigration

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Two similar takes, focussing on the welcome and rare, compared to other countries, support for immigration across political parties.

Starting with Ivison:

In mid-May, Bloc Québecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet put his Conservative counterpart, Pierre Poilievre, in a ticklish spot.

The Bloc introduced a motion denouncing the goal of an organization called the Century Initiative — co-founded by former ambassador to China Dominic Barton — to increase Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. It is a goal consistent with the federal government’s immigration intake targets, the motion said; a goal that would diminish the French language and Quebec’s political weight, as well as adversely impact housing and health-care availability.

The Conservatives, always keen to curry favour in Quebec, supported the motion that called on the House to reject the Century Initiative objectives. That allowed NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan to claim Poilievre “wants fewer immigrants to come to Canada.”

“The Conservative leader is showing his true colours and giving Canadians a sneak peek into how a Conservative government would set the country back decades,” she said.

That would be big news, if true. It would suggest that the postwar consensus that has characterized Canadian attitudes towards immigration for the past four decades is under threat, and that a future Conservative government would dramatically reduce the number of permanent residents arriving in Canada every year.

The problem with Kwan’s claim is that there is no evidence to support it in anything Poilievre or his immigration critic, Tom Kmiec, has said publicly.

In his contribution to the debate on the Bloc motion, Poilievre criticized wait times for those caught up in the immigration backlog, and the failure by the government to speed up credentials recognition for foreign-trained doctors and nurses.

“It boils my blood, sitting for five hours in hospital with my daughter, who has a migraine headache, that there are not enough doctors and nurses, while the gatekeepers block them,” he said.

True, he took potshots at Barton and criticized the Century Initiative goals as a “Utopian idea.” But his plan is to make the system more dynamic, not blow it up. “We don’t need Utopian schemes, what we need is some common sense,” he said.

Kmiec’s critique has been focused on the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, which he pointed out has seen its budget double since 2016, yet still has a 2.4-million application backlog.

The Conservatives, he said, would put greater emphasis on employer-driven immigration streams and address critical labour needs, such as the 100,000 construction workers the province of Ontario says it is short.

There have been no attacks from the Conservatives on what Maxime Bernier has called “radical multiculturalism,” which the wild-eyed People’s Party leader defined as “the misguided belief that all values and cultures can co-exist in one society.”

Bernier will have noted that recent public opinion polls suggest around 40 per cent of respondents think the Trudeau government’s immigration targets — 500,000 permanent newcomers in 2025 — are too high. He will also be aware that Conservative voters are most concerned that immigration is a burden, not a benefit.

His party claims immigration should not be used to “forcibly change the cultural character and social fabric” of the country and that target numbers should be substantially reduced to between 100,000 and 150,000. They are arguments that will resonate with many Conservative voters.

Yet, on this issue at least, Poilievre has not pandered to his political base.

This is curious, given that there are growing calls from policy experts for the government to re-examine its targets, or at least rein in the number of temporary residents coming to Canada.

In 2022, there were 437,000 new permanent residents, in line with the government’s projected target. But there were also 1.6 million workers and students who arrived as temporary residents — far more than had been anticipated.

Statistics Canada projects the population of Canada will be as much as 43 million within five years, but those projections could prove off-base if the growth in non-permanent residents continues at the current pace.

Lisa Lalande, chief executive of the Century Initiative, said there are legitimate concerns about the deepening housing crisis and the accessibility of quality jobs. “Without planned, strategic investments, population growth will put a strain on the quality of life. We have always advocated for smart, planned population growth,” she said.

Mike Moffat, senior director of the Smart Prosperity Initiative at the University of Ottawa, tracked the impact on the housing market of 504,618 new arrivals in Ontario in 2022–23.

In a similar time period, 71,838 new units were built, almost half of which were one-bedroom apartments — a new home for every seven people.

“There is a real risk that Canada runs if it doesn’t get its housing situation in order — namely the consensus (on immigration) could crumble,” Moffat said.

He pointed out there is no cap on non-permanent residents.

In particular, the number of international students has soared, to the point where enrollment numbers for Ontario’s colleges suggest that half of all students this year will have come from overseas. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that a large number are essentially guest workers, registering for some classes online while spending most of their week working in coffee shops and gas stations. Since the federal government is responsible for issuing those entry visas, this is one area that one might expect to see Poilievre promise to clamp down.

Yet, in a speech to Parliament, he accused the government of allowing international students to be abused and exploited by “human traffickers and shady consultants.”

Poilievre’s reasons are not that hard to fathom. Aside from the fact that his wife, Anaida, arrived in Canada as a refugee from Venezuela, Poilievre is competing for the support of the votes of many recent immigrants to Canada in the suburbs around the big cities. Not surprisingly, they are very keen on maintaining high family reunification numbers.

He is also aware that the majority of Canadians are in favour of secure, economically driven immigration. For all the comparisons with Donald Trump — contempt for civility, “insiders” and experts — Poilievre is an economic conservative, not a culture warrior.

It all suggests that the Conservative leader is not “anti-immigration,” as Kwan claimed, and that the political consensus on bringing in hundreds of thousands of newcomers to this country every year continues, whoever wins the next election.

That is to Canada’s advantage. “Immigration has not been a political issue in past elections because the political parties, the business community and Canadians in general have recognized the importance of immigration to our long-term prosperity,” said Lalande. “If it does become a political issue, it’s to our detriment.”

Source: John Ivison: As immigration doubts grow, Poilievre keeps the faith

In the Globe, Lawrence Martin, Canada’s best story might be immigration:

In the run-up to Canada’s 156th birthday celebrations there were reports, based on what people were telling pollsters, saying that Canada has never been more divided.

It appears these people weren’t around in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Quebec was aflame, when the West was up in arms with the Reform Party, when our deficits and debt approached Third World-levels, when we faced a crippling recession, when the separatist Bloc Québécois was our Official Opposition party, when a Quebec referendum nearly tore the country apart.

Conditions are worse now than then? Who are they trying to kid?

As a measure of today’s alleged divisiveness, the pessimists may wish to consider the issue of immigration. By the numbers, Canada is growing in leaps and bounds, with more than 400,000 newcomers arriving annually. According to Statistics Canada, the country’s annual population growth rate is currently 2.7 per cent, the highest it’s been since 1957.

Such incoming waves can test the temper of any land. They have certainly done so in other countries. But how much prejudice, acrimony, or backlash have we seen in Canada? By comparison, a pittance. Our huge influx of newcomers has proceeded calmly, and peaceably – and it’s a tribute to the character of Canadians and the strength of the national fabric.

On Canada Day, praise for the country was not in abundance. In these times it’s the curmudgeons who hold court. But while there are plenty of things to grouse about, how we are doing on the critically important issue of immigration is not one of them.

We’re dwarfing our competitors, outpacing the population growth rate of the United States, Great Britain and other G7 countries by large percentages. Some countries’ populations have also stagnated or are tumbling, like that of Russia’s or China’s.

Canada’s large number of retiring baby boomers and its lower birth rate necessitate the great expansion. It is indispensable to nation-building.

The influx is accompanied by many problems, like housing shortages, that are not to be underestimated. But these hardly compare to the situations in the United States and the countries of Europe and elsewhere where the arrival of immigrant waves have become powder kegs, triggering bigotry, racism and hard-right movements that threaten stability and democracy.

Immigrants to Canada are not feared, but welcomed. Some have gone so far as to say we’re creating a multicultural Mecca. That’s a bit of a stretch. But how many other countries are doing better at cultivating a more diverse and inclusive society; an ethnic mosaic?

Politically, the country has become increasingly polarized. But immigration is one big issue that offers an exception. There is consensus among the major parties for the expansion.

With the influx, abetted by several government programs, comes an infusion of brains, talent, and creativity. While we once worried about a brain drain to the U.S., it’s now the U.S. that should be worried about a brain drain in our direction. The Trump administration viewed foreign-born scientists and engineers as a threat. Washington cut back on visas allowing highly educated foreigners residence, leaving an opening that Ottawa has happily taken advantage of.

Immigration from India is an example. In recent years, the number of Indians moving to Canada has tripled. At Canadian colleges and universities, the number of Indian students has boomed, while the number of science and engineering graduate students from India at American universities has steadily declined in recent years.

Where immigration may run into strong opposition is in its potential to exacerbate the housing shortage crisis. If Canada can’t adequately house its population, critics can reasonably challenge the advisability of bringing in so many newcomers.

But while he is a staunch critic of the government’s housing policies, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has steered clear of placing the blame on immigration policies. To go there would run the risk, given Canadian sensibilities, of charges of prejudice and racism. People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier has called for major decreases in immigration numbers, but the issue hasn’t helped him at the polls. This isn’t the United States.

The housing crunch and other stresses, such as fears in Quebec over the declining use of French, need to be weighed against the advantages. As economists attest, given our labour force shortages, newcomers are required to sustain Canada’s economic growth. New brain power is necessary if we are to improve our dismal record on productivity.

Throughout history, immigration has shaped Canada. It is doing so now on an even more imposing scale. Few issues are of more importance. It is our big story and it may be our best.

Source: Canada’s best story might be immigration

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McWhorter: On Race and Academia

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Another advocate of class and adversity-based policies, sharing his personal experiences:

The Supreme Court last week outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. That practice was understandable and even necessary 60 years ago. The question I have asked for some time was precisely how long it would be required to continue. I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness.

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I’d like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s decision move me to venture it.

The culture that a policy helps put into place can be as important as the policy itself. And in my lifetime, racial preferences in academia — not merely when it comes to undergraduate admissions but also moving on to grad school and job applications and teaching careers — have been not only a set of formal and informal policies but also the grounds for a culture of perceptions and assumptions.

I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.

I have no reason to think affirmative action played much of a role in the colleges I went to for undergraduate and graduate work, as neither was extremely selective at the time. In the latter case, I was told by a mentor, a Black man, that race had been the reason I wound up in the top 20 pile of applicants for graduate study in linguistics in the department where I got my Ph.D. I had minimal experience with linguistics proper, and my G.P.A. was very good but nowhere near perfect. (Those hobbies!) But I have always thought of that as racial preferences the way they should have been, merely additive around the margins. I’d done well on tests like the G.R.E., my grades in language courses were top level and I had written a senior thesis that made it clear I had a linguistics frame of mind.

But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt like I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all.

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

At the time I was not very politicized, and I assumed that my race had merely been a background bonus to help me get hired. Only later did the reality become more apparent, when I learned just who else had been on that shortlist. (I will never forget how awkward it was when I met one of them — older than me, with more gravitas in the field — some years later. I sensed that we both knew what had happened and why.) I had been hired by white people who, quite innocently, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing a Black person onto the faculty. I bear them no malice; under the culture we were all living in, I would have done the same thing.

Around this time I gave some really good talks, and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. And in the meantime, I was hopelessly undercooked for the position I had been hired for. I was not utterly clueless, but I simply didn’t know enough yet — and especially not enough to be in a position to counsel graduate students.

 needed some years of postdoctoral study. They say you don’t really know it till you teach it, and that’s largely true: Having never actually taught a class, I needed to teach some. I needed to hang around linguistics for a longer time in general. There are formative experiences key to being a real linguist that I had not yet had, such as long-term work with speakers of my language of focus, Saramaccan.

The doctoral program I had been in had gone through a phase of allowing students perhaps too much leeway in deciding which courses to take. Many students took this as an occasion to sit at the feet of their mentors and drink in what they knew. But my natural orientation has always been autodidactic, and so I basically went off into a corner and focused like a laser on one issue that particularly interested me — how creole languages form — while developing only a passing acquaintance with linguistics beyond it. With undergrads, I could coast on stage presence, but grad students know the real thing when they see it — and when they don’t. I looked like a fool.

I didn’t like it. But because I am obsessive, I ultimately dedicated myself to boning up and then some. I read and read and read. I spoke closely with as many linguists as I could. I took up new interests within the field. I did intense study of my language of focus. I taught classes outside my comfort zone. That is, I became a normal academic.

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

Source: On Race and Academia

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U.S. maternal deaths keep rising. Here’s who is most at risk

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Likely similar variations in Canada although hopefully there has not been a comparable increase:

The number of people dying in the U.S. from pregnancy-related causes has more than doubled in the last 20 years, according to a new study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And while the study found mortality rates remain “unacceptably high among all racial and ethnic groups across the U.S.,” the worst outcomes were among Black women, Native American and Alaska Native people.

The study looks at state-by-state data from 2009 to 2019. Co-author Dr. Allison Bryant, an obstetrician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says maternal death rates in the U.S. just keep getting worse.

“And that is exacerbated in populations that have been historically underserved or for whom structural racism affects them greatly,” she says.

Maternal death rates have consistently been the highest among Black women, and those high rates more than doubled over the last twenty years. For Native American and Alaska Native people, the rates have tripled.

Dr. Gregory Roth, at the University of Washington, also co-authored the paper. He says efforts to stop pregnancy deaths have not only stalled in areas like the South, where the rates have typically been high. “We’re showing that they are worsening in places that are thought of as having better health,” he says.

Places like New York and New Jersey saw an increase in deaths among Black and Latina mothers. Wyoming and Montana saw more Asian mothers die. And while maternal mortality is lower for white women, it is also increasing in some parts of the country.

“We see that for white women, maternal mortality is also increasing throughout the South, in parts of New England and throughout parts of the Midwest and Northern Mountain States,” he says.

The steady increase in maternal mortality in the U.S. is in contrast to other high-income countries which have seen their much lower rates decline even further.

“There’s this crystal clear graph that’s been out there that’s very striking,” Bryant says. With countries like the Netherlands, Austria and Japan with a clear decrease. “And then there is the U.S. that is far above all of them and going in the opposite direction,” she says.

Most maternal deaths are deemed preventable by state review committees. Dr. Catherine Spong, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says pregnancy-related deaths can be caused by different things. The biggest risk factors are conditions like cardiovascular disease, severe pre-eclampsia, maternal cardiac disease and hemorrhage, she says.

Continuing heart problems and mental health conditions can also contribute to the death of a new mother.

The researchers say doctors would have a better chance of dealing with these health conditions, if more women had access to healthcare after their babies were born.

About half the births in the U.S. are paid for by Medicaid and “the majority of the deaths are in the immediate postpartum period,” Roth says. “If you don’t have easy access to health care in this period, you’re at very high risk.”

For those who get their healthcare through Medicaid, medical coverage lasts at least two months after the birth of a child. Since 2021, states have had the option to extend that coverage for a year. So far, 36 states and Washington D.C. have done so. States like Alabama and Mississippi, which saw some of the highest maternal death increases, did not.

Source: U.S. maternal deaths keep rising. Here’s who is most at risk

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Matas: Canada urgently needs to release its Holocaust-related records 

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Agree:

The Canadian Access to Information system has broken down. The dysfunctional nature of the system is highlighted by the difficulty in accessing Holocaust records.

The Holocaust ended in 1945, more than 78 years ago. The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes, completed its work in 1986, almost 37 years ago. The Canadian effort to bring Nazi war criminals to justice has ended. The survivors are fast disappearing.

Though the records in Canada of the Holocaust and its perpetrators are old, their release is urgent. We will soon no longer be able to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the testimony of survivors – we will have to rely on the records. Yet, efforts to get the release of Holocaust-related records have gone nowhere.

Remembering the Holocaust means not just remembering the victims. It means also remembering their murderers. We need access to the report written by Alti Rodal for the Deschênes Commission, titled Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present. It was written to be public in its entirety, but has been released subject only to inexplicable extensive deletions. Part II of the Deschênes Commission report, addressing individual cases, has not been made public. And the hundreds of Nazi war crimes files originally held by the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are inaccessible.

Canada is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The Alliance’s 2000 Stockholm Declaration commits the signatories to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the opening of archives in order to ensure that all documents bearing on the Holocaust are available to researchers.” The Alliance’s Monitoring Access to Archives Project recommended in 2017 that governmental archival institutions “release Holocaust related records, irrespective of any personal identifying information or national security classifications.” Yet, Canada is not respecting these commitments.

B’nai Brith Canada filed a request for Nazi war crimes related records in January, 2022, to Library and Archives Canada. A year and a half later, the institution has yet to provide a date by which the request would be processed.

In February, 2022, B’nai Brith Canada asked the Department of Justice for the files of all Nazi war crimes relating to people who died more than 20 years ago, the period after which privacy protection expires. The department replied that “it does not have the capabilities” to respond to the request.

B’nai Brith Canada then modified its request to ask for only those Nazi war crimes files of the people named by the Deschênes Commission, excluding cases that went to court, and persons not yet dead for 20 years. The Department of Justice responded in July, 2022, that it would take 1,285 days, that is to say more than three-and-a-half years, to answer the request

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, in its report dated June 20, made a number of welcome recommendations, one of which was the automatic release of historical documents that are more than 25 years old. The federal government has so many documents and so little staff and budget allocated to deal with them that the only way to make the access to information system work is to automatically release whole categories of records. Requiring consideration of each and every document to determine whether any one of a long list of exemptions to disclosure applies is a recipe for inaction.

Philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet, we cannot remember a past that remains hidden from us. To remember the past, we have to know the past.

Only through public access to Holocaust archives can we learn lessons from those archives. Learning lessons from the Holocaust is a legacy we can create for the victims, giving meaning to the senseless death of innocents. To learn those lessons, we need access to the archives.

David Matas is senior counsel to B’nai Brith Canada. He is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Monitoring Access to Archives Project.

Source: Canada urgently needs to release its Holocaust-related records

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Being HIV positive is no longer a death sentence. So why does Canada insist on sharing immigration applicants’ HIV status with their sponsors?

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Of note:

When they found love in Mexico 10 years ago, one of the first things the Canadian man’s boyfriend confided in him was that he was HIV-positive.

But the medical condition was no longer seen as the health threat it had once been, and it wasn’t going to stop their budding relationship.

The couple maintained a long-distance romance for four years before the Mexican partner moved to Toronto in 2017 on a work permit.

It was when they started their spousal sponsorship application in 2020 that the couple learned of Canada’s automatic HIV-partner-disclosure policy.

It’s a policy that mandates an immigration applicant or refugee prove they have disclosed their medical condition to the person who is sponsoring them to Canada.

The couple say they found the formal process not only offensive but frustrating, as it delayed the processing of their file for an additional 18 months.

Finally, they were scheduled for the long-awaited brief interview in April to confirm, in person, that the sponsored partner’s HIV status had been disclosed.

“It’s not just a privacy issue. I also just feel incredibly stigmatized,” said the 55-year-old Canadian fashion designer, who asked not to be identified to protect his partner’s privacy.

“I don’t feel it’s anybody’s business, and I don’t feel it’s something that needs to be addressed for my partner.”

The so-called “automatic partner notification policy” has been in place since 2003 as a public health measure to stop the spread of the HIV virus, which, if untreated, can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or AIDS, a disease that has killed millions.

However, modern medical treatment has transformed the virus into a manageable medical condition, and advocates say that, after two decades, the immigration department’s “out-of-date and discriminatory” policy should go.

In mid-June, three organizations wrote to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser and Marci Ien, the minister for women and gender equality and youth, demanding the policy be revoked and saying that it was discriminating against people with HIV and violating their right to equal treatment under the Canadian Charter.

“Not only does the Policy significantly extend the length of processing of immigration applications for people living with HIV, it also perpetuates myths and stereotypes that people with HIV are deceptive and are less worthy of intimate relationships,” the letter noted.

The signatories of the letter include the HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic of Ontario (HALCO), the HIV Legal Network, and the Coalition des organismes communautaires québécois de lutte contre le sida (COCQ-SIDA).

Michael Battista, their counsel, said the policy is discriminatory because only those applicants sponsored under the family and refugee classes are subject to the disclosure to partner policy.

Temporary residence visa applicants — visitors, international students, temporary foreign workers — and those applying for permanent residence under economic class are not under the same scrutiny even though they, too, could potentially be HIV positive.

“We let in HIV-positive foreign students, foreign workers. We don’t ever force them to reveal to their intimate partners that they’re HIV positive. Why are we singling out the family class and dependent refugees?” asked Battista.

“It’s not even serving the ends of its public health concern.”

The policy is unique to HIV-positive applicants. There is no similar mechanism for other health conditions.

Immigration applicants with active pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) and untreated syphilis can be found inadmissible to Canada, unless they are treated, on the grounds that their condition is a danger to public safety, according to the standards laid down by Health Canada.

However, unlike TB and untreated syphilis, immigration officials do not consider HIV a danger to public health.

When the original policy was implemented, it required consent of the HIV-positive applicant for immigration officials to contact their sponsor in Canada about their HIV status and assess whether the sponsor would withdraw their application.

To avoid the impression that the policy was prompting sponsors to withdraw their applications, the updated policy has, since 2016, given the HIV-positive applicant 60 days to provide proof they have informed their sponsor of their diagnosis or to withdraw their application. If the applicant takes no action, immigration officials will then inform the sponsor about their HIV status after 60 days have elapsed.

HIV-positive sponsorship applicants must also attend a compulsory interview that is not required of other sponsorship applicants.

Battista said immigration officials had not strictly adhered to the policy until about 18 months ago, when he started to see the processing times of the HIV positive clients’ cases “inexplicably lengthened.”

“The explanation we got was they were being put into the interview stream automatically. We tried to be proactive and provide evidence that the sponsor was advised of the HIV-positive health condition of the person being sponsored,” said Battista. “But they just didn’t budge.”

He said the policy perpetuates a stereotype that people with HIV are morally blameworthy and irresponsible in taking precautions to prevent the transmission of HIV.

On its website, the immigration department said the policy does not intend to “inflict unnecessary hardship” on applicants or sponsors.

“Rather, it is a measure that will protect the health and safety of the spouses and partners (residing in Canada) of applicants in the family and dependent refugee classes who test positive for HIV,” it noted.

While the change of language in the 2016 policy was an improvement, Avineet Cheema, staff lawyer at HALCO, said it still doesn’t reflect modern science.

“This is a policy that was implemented at a time when there wasn’t as much modern science advancements when it comes to HIV and suppressing viral loads and things like that,” said Cheema, who has seen cases in which an officer asked the sponsor why they’re comfortable marrying an HIV carrier.

“Being diagnosed with HIV is in no way a death sentence at this time. And it is very manageable with medications to the point that there isn’t even a real decrease in life expectancy.”

There are other sexually transmitted infections, said Cheema, and singling out HIV further stigmatizes those living with the virus.

“That really targets the dignity of people who are living with HIV, because the Canadian government is essentially telling them, ‘You’re different. You are dangerous. Your health condition makes it so.’”

The policy, she added, disproportionately affects gay, trans, Black and other racialized people, due to the heightened impact of the HIV stigma.

The Canadian sponsor of the Mexican partner said they are committed and responsible adults, but were uncomfortable at their April interview at the immigration office in Niagara Falls.

“I felt there was homophobia hidden behind a mask of protocol,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair that they single out people with HIV. It’s not fair for my partner to have to go through that.”

In an email to the Star, the immigration department said it doesn’t collect data on the notifications issued, interviews conducted and sponsorship withdrawals recorded under the policy.

A department spokesperson said the policy is currently under review and that any modifications will be made to the public when it is completed.

Source: Being HIV positive is no longer a death sentence. So why does Canada insist on sharing immigration applicants’ HIV status with their sponsors?

Filed under LGBTQ, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

US citizenship test changes are coming, raising concerns for those with low English skills

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Similar debates when Canada changed the citizenship test in 2009. The initial drop in pass rates from about 95 percent to 85 percent eventually resulted in changes that resulted in a more reasonable pass rate of 91-92 percent more recently. But literacy, education and the related familiarity with tests all played a role:

The U.S. citizenship test is being updated, and some immigrants and advocates worry the changes will hurt test-takers with lower levels of English proficiency.

The naturalization test is one of the final steps toward citizenship — a monthslong process that requires legal permanent residency for years before applying.

Many are still shaken after former Republican President Donald Trump’s administration changed the test in 2020, making it longer and more difficult to pass. Within months, Democratic President Joe Biden took office and signed an executive order aimed at eliminating barriers to citizenship. In that spirit, the citizenship test was changed back to its previous version, which was last updated in 2008.

In December, U.S. authorities said the test was due for an update after 15 years. The new version is expected late next year.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes that the new test adds a speaking section to assess English skills. An officer would show photos of ordinary scenarios – like daily activities, weather or food – and ask the applicant to verbally describe the photos.

In the current test, an officer evaluates speaking ability during the naturalization interview by asking personal questions the applicant has already answered in the naturalization paperwork.

“For me, I think it would be harder to look at pictures and explain them,” said Heaven Mehreta, who immigrated from Ethiopia 10 years ago, passed the naturalization test in May and became a U.S. citizen in Minnesota in June.

Mehreta, 32, said she learned English as an adult after moving to the U.S. and found pronunciation to be very difficult. She worries that adding a new speaking section based on photos, rather than personal questions, will make the test harder for others like her.

Shai Avny, who immigrated from Israel five years ago and became a U.S. citizen last year, said the new speaking section could also increase the stress applicants already feel during the test.

“Sitting next to someone from the federal government, it can be intimidating to talk and speak with them. Some people have this fear anyway. When it’s not your first language, it can be even more difficult. Maybe you will be nervous and you won’t find the words to tell them what you need to describe,” Avny said. “It’s a test that will determine if you are going to be a citizen. So there is a lot to lose.”

Another proposed change would make the civics section on U.S. history and government multiple-choice instead of the current oral short-answer format.

Bill Bliss, a citizenship textbook author in Massachusetts, gave an example in a blog post of how the test would become more difficult because it would require a larger base of knowledge.

A current civics question has an officer asking the applicant to name a war fought by the U.S. in the 1900s. The applicant only needs to say one out of five acceptable answers – World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War or Gulf War – to get the question right.

But in the proposed multiple-choice format, the applicant would read that question and select the correct answer from the following choices: A. Civil War B. Mexican-American War C. Korean War D. Spanish-American War

The applicant must know all five of the wars fought by the U.S. in the 1900s in order to select the one correct answer, Bliss said, and that requires a “significantly higher level of language proficiency and test-taking skill.”

Currently, the applicant must answer six out of 10 civics questions correctly to pass. Those 10 questions are selected from a bank of 100 civics questions. The applicant is not told which questions will be selected but can see and study the 100 questions before taking the test.

Lynne Weintraub, a citizenship coordinator at Jones Library’s English as a Second Language Center in Massachusetts, said the proposed format for the civics section could make the citizenship test harder for people who struggle with English literacy. That includes refugees, elderly immigrants and people with disabilities that interfere with their test performance.

“We have a lot of students that are refugees, and they’re coming from war-torn countries where maybe they didn’t have a chance to complete school or even go to school,” said Mechelle Perrott, a citizenship coordinator at San Diego Community College District’s College of Continuing Education in California.

“It’s more difficult learning to read and write if you don’t know how to do that in your first language. That’s my main concern about the multiple-choice test; it’s a lot of reading,” Perrott said.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a December announcement that the proposed changes “reflect current best practices in test design” and would help standardize the citizenship test.

Under federal law, most applicants seeking citizenship must demonstrate an understanding of the English language – including an ability to speak, read and write words in ordinary usage – and demonstrate knowledge of U.S. history and government.

The agency said it will conduct a nationwide trial of the proposed changes in 2023 with opportunities for public feedback. Then, an external group of experts — in the fields of language acquisition, civics and test development — will review the results of the trial and recommend ways to best implement the proposed changes, which could take effect late next year.

The U.S. currently has the easiest citizenship test compared to other Western countries — including Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom — according to Sara Goodman, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Goodman said she uses the following metrics to determine the difficulty of a test: the number of questions required to pass and the number of questions overall, the percentage of applicants who pass the test, the language level of the test, and whether or not questions with answers are made available to study before taking the test.

In the U.S. test, applicants must answer six out of 10 questions correctly to pass. About 96% of applicants pass the test, according to recent estimates. The test is at a “high beginner” level of English, Goodman said, and a question bank with answers is made available to study beforehand.

But in the German test, Goodman said applicants must answer 17 out of 33 questions correctly to pass. About 90% of applicants pass the test, according to recent estimates. The test is at an “intermediate” level of German, according to Goodman. And a question bank with answers is made available.

The Canada and United Kingdom tests are even harder, and a question bank is not provided in the latter, Goodman said.

Elizabeth Jacobs, director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies – a nonprofit research organization that advocates for less immigration – said the proposed changes would make the U.S. citizenship test even easier for many people.

“We think that’s in the wrong direction,” Jacobs said on behalf of the organization.

The proposed multiple-choice format for the civics section would put the answer to each question in front of applicants, Jacobs said, and would get rid of the memory challenge that’s in the current test.

Jacobs said her organization would prefer a test that includes more material and emphasizes American values, such as religious freedom and freedom of speech, more.

She added that most people who naturalize in the U.S. are not in the country because of merit or refugee status, but because of family sponsorship, where someone in their family became a U.S. citizen before them and petitioned for them to naturalize.

Jacobs said having a stricter test would help ensure that new citizens integrate into American society – and the economy – with sufficient English language skills, as well as promote a healthy democracy with civics knowledge and engagement.

Not everyone agrees.

“Is it important for us to even have a civics test in the first place? I don’t know the answer to that question,” said Corleen Smith, director of immigration services at the International Institute of Minnesota, a nonprofit that connects immigrants to resources.

Smith said USCIS already evaluates whether applicants have past criminal histories, pay taxes and support their children financially.

“They’re already evaluating that portion of your background. Is it also important to know this information about history and government and be able to memorize it?” Smith said, adding: “People that were born in the U.S. and are natural-born citizens — a lot of those folks don’t know many of these answers to the history of government questions.”

More than 1 million people became U.S. citizens in fiscal year 2022 — one of the highest numbers on record since 1907, the earliest year with available data — and USCIS reduced the huge backlog of naturalization applications by over 60% compared to the year before, according to a USCIS report also released in December

Source: US citizenship test changes are coming, raising concerns for those with low English skills

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

Should we replace some public servants with computerized agents?

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Yes, as a means to improve citizen service and reduce wait times for routine applications and services. But prior to doing so, do the hard work of reviewing programs and opportunities for simplificant and streamlining rather than assuming tech is a solution to address program complexity, duplication and incoherence between programs.

Most of us have experience with chatbots, who are likely to become more effective given advances in large language models such as ChatGBT:

Take a moment to imagine your next application for passport renewal. Rather than heading to a passport office, the government now allows you to apply online. If the passport office wants to follow up, instead of inviting you to visit in person, they send you a text, asking you to call a number.

Your call is connected immediately, and the agent is pleasant, speaking your language fluently with a slightly hard-to-identify accent. She asks you benign but interesting questions about your upcoming trip. At the end of the conversation, she lets you know that your application will be approved. You thank her enthusiastically, and she wishes you a safe journey.

This scenario is the kind of ideal government interaction that Canadians dream of. But what if that pleasant person who helped you was in fact a highly intelligent computer? Would it change our feelings about the level of service?

What if, instead of a passport application, you were interacting over a medical need; a question of a child support payment; or a request for employment insurance after a job loss? What if you were trying to speak to your local member of Parliament, asking them for assistance in a public matter or to express your opinion on an issue

The reality is that governments are not far from having access to such services. Large language models – made famous by OpenAI’s ChatGPT – are improving at a breathtaking pace. Speech technology and voice recognition are developing at a similar rate. When the linguistic fluency of a language generator is combined with speech technology, the capacity exists to have a conversation with a computer that differs undetectably from one with a human. These digital agents can seamlessly incorporate the information they are receiving in real-time to make judgments that their owners – in this case, the government – program them to make. A world of digital agents who can replace public servants is closer than we think.

Should we help that world develop or hold it back? Of course, we would all rather deal with a real human who behaves like our imaginary artificial agent – quickly, empathetically and accurately. But for many users of government services, that’s not the right comparison case. Which would you prefer: The scenario we described above with an intelligent chatbot? Or the scenario in which you get a notification that you have to head to the passport office (which involves finding it and either securing an appointment or waiting in line) to talk to someone? Or the alternative – to wade through phone trees and hold music to talk to someone who may be at the end of a difficult day and not all that interested in solving your problem, not able to speak your language idiomatically, or unable to explain things in terms you understand?

In the passport example, the constraint on providing better services with an intelligent chatbot would not be the availability of workers to process passport decisions, but the capacity of this technology to scale up. Marginal costs are low here.

To be sure, there are challenges in using these technologies. Their advantages are only realized when more discretion is given to the digital agent. We would have to allow it to make decisions. How do we audit the decisions of robots? And who is accountable for the decisions which they make? What is the recourse when they make the wrong calls, or even do harm through their choices?

These are the kinds of choices governments will need to make about how they are willing to deploy digital agents to deliver services. There will come a moment in the future, perhaps the near future, where the cost of such agents will be low enough and the need for more government services will be high enough, that saying no to such machines will be impossible. Before that time comes, governments ought to decide what principles will guide their use.

There are multiple ways to achieve this. Governments could engage in substantial public consultations and hearings, with both experts and regular citizens. They could convene groups of citizens to deliberate over the principles and rules for the deployment of digital agents. They could run small, open trials, where citizen use of these technologies is entirely voluntary and the results of decisions are open to public scrutiny.

However governments decide to tackle these future choices, the decision must be made a priority now. The aspiration of democracies has long been a government for the people, but also by the people. And it’s up to democracies to decide if the same rule should apply to public services.

Peter Loewen is the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Gillian Hadfield is the director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Source: Should we replace some public servants with computerized agents?

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Maximum Canada is happening

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Rather naive in terms of minimizing the practicalities of ensuring adequate housing, healthcare and infrastructure, one of the key points that Saunders needed to be addressed in Maximum Canada. And the nation-building aspect overstated, given this gap and persistent low productivity that current policies, with few exceptions, are not addressing. Same large population fallacies:

A lot of people — at least, a lot of people who read this blog — know of Matt Yglesias’ book One Billion Americans. It’s good, you should read it. But not as many seem to know that it’s actually a riff on a book that came out three years earlier called Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough, by Doug Saunders. In fact, the books are pretty different; Saunders spends most of his time justifying the idea of a bigger Canada with appeals to the country’s history, culture, and politics, where Yglesias mostly discusses the practical details of how we’d fit the newcomers into the country. 

But what these two books share is that they’re both advocating a certain type of nation-building strategy — the idea of deliberately promoting large-scale immigration in order to expand a country’s population toward a numerical target. This isn’t something the U.S. has really done in the past. We enacted laws to make immigration more or less restrictive, but this was typically done either as an ad-hoc reaction to a wave of immigration pressure from abroad (e.g. in 1924), or out of moral and ideological concerns (e.g. in 1965). To a large extent, we didn’t really have to do this; people were almost always beating down our door to get here, and all we had to do was sit back and decide who to let in. (In the two decades after the Civil War, there was some talk of recruiting immigrants from abroad to populate the Midwest and West, but this was shelved when it turned out lots of people wanted to come of their own accord.) 

Canada, for much of its own history, was similar. But in recent years, the Canadian government has begun to set hard targets for immigration, such as last year’s target of 1.5 million more by 2025. And the country is deliberately encouraging more people to come, with one of the world’s most aggressive recruitment strategies. 

First, let’s just take a look at the results Canada is achieving. The country’s population has just passed 40 million — a 14% increase from when Doug Saunders published Maximum Canada. The national statistics agency loudly celebrated the achievement. And the country’s population growth rate has just shot up to over 3.5%, which is among the world’s fastest:

Source: Brent Donnelly

Here’s another fun graph, just from Nova Scotia:

Source: Deny Sullivan

And this is all from immigration. The country’s total fertility rate is 1.4, far below the replacement rate. Yet population is booming because Canada is recruiting from abroad.

This isn’t quite Maximum Canada yet, but it’s clearly headed in that direction. 

And Canada’s zeal for greater population inflows is matched by its determination to recruit the best and the brightest en masse. The country’s points-based immigration system, the Federal Skilled Worker Program, is well-known, as is the Provincial Nominee Program that allows individual Canadian provinces to recruit immigrant workers to specific locations. But the country keeps adding more programs for grabbing talent. Its latest idea includes an offer of permanent residency to people working in the United States on H-1B visas — basically, poaching America’s own skilled immigrants! Here are some excerpts from the announcement:

As part of Canada’s first-ever Tech Talent Strategy, Minister Fraser announced the following aggressive attraction measures:

  • the creation of an open work permit stream for H-1B specialty occupation visa holders in the US to apply for a Canadian work permit, and study or work permit options for their accompanying family members
  • the development of an Innovation Stream under to the International Mobility Program to attract highly talented individuals…
  • the promotion of Canada as a destination for digital nomads
  • the creation of a STEM-specific draw…under the Express Entry program…
  • improvements to the Start-up Visa Program

Canada also has family-based and humanitarian immigration programs like the U.S. does, but the big difference here is that they take absolutely massive numbers of skilled immigrants from all over the world.

All of this adds up to what looks to me like a nation-building strategy. Canada has a clear vision for itself as a multicultural mecca for all of the world’s smart and hard-working people. It’s a bit like Singapore, except more democratic, and without that country’s emphasis on preserving a single ethnicity’s demographic dominance. If you’re smart and you want to work and you like Canadian culture, it doesn’t matter what you look like; you’re in the club. 

What’s amazing is that the vast majority of the country’s populace appears to have signed onto this strategy. As Derek Thompson writes, immigration has not produced a big backlash in Canada, outside of some highly localized concerns (like Chinese capital flight buying up property in Vancouver). A little of this might be from the Anglophone majority’s desire to reduce the political influence of Quebec, but much of it is just that multiculturalism and immigration are deeply rooted in the country’s self-defined national identity. And on top of that, the fact that so much of Canada’s immigration is based on employment prospects and skills probably reduces social friction; immigrants are likely to make a lot of money and not commit much crime. 

There’s also one additional factor that no one talks about, but which would definitely be on my mind if I were Canadian: national security. Canada has a very large, very powerful, and occasionally politically unstable neighbor to its south. It has already defeated one invasion from that southern neighbor, and while more recently relations between the two countries have been friendlier, you never know when attitudes might shift. A country of 100 million would be a lot more capable of resisting the U.S. than a country of 40 million. 

Of course, there are major challenges for Canada’s nation-building strategy. Chief among these is NIMBYism; Canada is huge, but you can’t just scatter your population randomly across the plain (I mean, you can try, but the results are comedic). Modern knowledge-based economies harness clustering and agglomeration effects, which means Canada needs to fit those new millions into its cities. And despite very low crime rates, Canada is having a bit of trouble doing this. Unlike Japan, Canada does not have simple national zoning laws administered by a competent technocratic bureaucracy; instead, local municipalities are free to block housing as they choose. 

And block it they do. The Fraser Institute notes that Canada is not building nearly enough housing to house its massive population inflows:

And the mismatch has been getting worse over time:

Source: Fraser Institute
Source: Fraser Institute

Jean-François Perrault of Scotiabank notes that Canada has fewer housing units per 1000 people than France, Germany, Japan, the UK, or even the United States. He writes:

A key challenge is finding an approach that can overcome the political obstacles to a better supply response. Very often within city limits, measures to increase density pit current owners versus prospective residents. Municipal councillors are politically responsive to their voters given the nature of the democratic process. What may be great policy from a national perspective, like high immigration, runs into obstacles when it means finding practical solutions at the local level to increase the housing stock…

To get a sense of the main obstacles to a more elastic supply response, we have polled several of our clients in real estate and development across the country to find the cross-cutting factors they see as most limiting supply growth. To no surprise, the key impediments are in the planning and approval process. In many major cities, the entitlement process is very lengthy and unduly political. Many processes can delay or derail development applications and this can be exacerbated by under-resourced planning departments within cities.

Hmm, where have I heard this story before??

Even Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism is starting to come into conflict with its anti-housing NIMBY instincts. The government returned a plot of land in the middle of downtown Vancouver to the Squamish Nation, which promptly planned a very cool dense housing development with solarpunk aesthetics. The project is still going ahead, but urban planners are now starting to complain about the density, and local residents are trying to stop an access road to the development.

This will simply not do. If you let in tens of millions of people, you must house them; there is simply no other option, other than to let rents continue to skyrocket until the people revolt. Canadian leaders would do well to supplement Doug Saunders’ book with Matt Yglesias’ pragmatic tome. If Canada can’t figure out how to beat its entrenched NIMBY instincts and replace its old ideal of quiet pastoral low-rise cities with one of dense, bustling, efficiently functioning metropolises, it will never achieve Maximum Canada. 

In the meantime, though, we Americans to the south need to take a hard look at what Canada is doing, and ask ourselves why we can’t do something similar. Like Canada, the U.S. is a highly diverse nation of immigrants. Like Canada, our fertility is below replacement (though not quite as bad), and we rely on immigration for population growth. Like Canada, we face the inherent economic disadvantage of being located far from the world population supercluster in Asia, and thus we will always be fighting an uphill battle to get high-value industries to want to locate here. So like Canada, we should be importing huge numbers of skilled immigrants — especially because our software and finance and biotech industry clusters, and our world-beating research universities, make it easier for us to attract skilled immigrants in the first place. We should be playing to our strengths. 

And yet in the U.S., immigration of any kind is now at the center of a vicious culture war. The political right may occasionally claim that they only oppose illegal immigration, or that they want skilled immigration, but when it comes time for actual policy proposals, what they want is just to decrease all types of immigration. The days of pro-immigration Republicans like George W. Bush are gone. In fact, various hard-right figures have specifically railed against immigration from India, which is America’s most important source of skilled immigrants. 

Meanwhile, American progressives, unlike their Canadian counterparts, seem generally unenthusiastic about the idea of mass recruitment of high-skilled foreign workers; my suspicion is that they fear the competition the children of these immigrants will provide for their own children in the academic system. Instead, in recent years, some progressives have begun to lean toward the idea that immigration should be viewed as a form of reparations for colonialism, rather than a strategy for nation-building. Naturally, that absurd idea just triggers the right even more. 

This is a terrible political equilibrium. Survey after survey finds that Americans very strongly support high-skilled immigration, but because it’s a political football, only centrists like Biden seem interested in doing anything about it. Without a popular political mandate, any nation-building strategy like Canada’s is doomed. 

I wish Americans could tell themselves a positive narrative like Canada’s — of immigration as the way to build a multicultural nation. Many of us have tried to tell that narrative, and have foundered on the rocks of America’s age of division. As John Higham wrote, when America is underconfident — when we start to doubt who we are as a people and a nation — we instinctively think about closing the door. Right now, America definitely doesn’t know who we are, as a people and as a nation. Maybe next decade we’ll remember.

Canada, however, does know who they are. And good for them. Now all they have to do is build a bunch of housing, and they’ll be golden. 

Source: Maximum Canada is happening

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

Many Finns Party ministers have pointed to replacement theory

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

A HANDFUL of the Finns Party’s ministers have made overt and less overt references to the predominantly white far-right conspiracy theory known as the great replacement or replacement theory.

Helsingin Sanomat on Monday reported that Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Ville Tavio (PS) has pointed to the conspiracy theory in a number of statements in the session hall of the Finnish Parliament.

The theory alleges that left-leaning domestic or international elites are trying to replace the white population with non-white immigrants, enabling non-white majorities to take control of key institutions, destroy cultures and traditions, and ultimately eliminate white populations. The theory has also found its way into, for example, the rhetoric of the Republican Party in the US.The Finnish name for the theory is ‘väestönvaihto,’ which translates directly into population replacement.

Tavio has spoken about “population replacement,” a “population change process,” “foreignisation of the population” and “artificial” population growth through immigration, listed Helsingin Sanomat.

In 2021, he linked the conspiracy theory to the government’s policy toward the EU: “The Finnish population won’t get back its own free land because it has been handed over as a playground for the EU. We’re being depleted and the basis of our population is being changed supposedly in the name of wonderful multiculturalism.”

“The socialist government is advocating its own agendas with no regard for the means and won’t stop until our country has been depleted in the name of climate change and our population has been replaced in line with multicultural ideals,” he stated later during the same session.

Tavio viewed a year earlier that immigration is on track to result in a demographic change that can be likened to population replacement.

“Population growth rests on immigration and the birth rate among immigrants. If this continues, the outcome is a change in demographics. You could also talk about the so-called population replacement,” he remarked according to the newspaper.

Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen (PS) in February used a hashtag related to the replacement theory when sharing a tweet concerning demographic changes in Espoo, Southern Finland, according to YLE.

Two years earlier she appeared to nod at the theory when commenting on a newspaper article about population growth in Africa: “At this rate, Europe will become part of Africa unless the tone and politics change. But some may genuinely want that.”

YLE also reported that her website was recently updated to remove a sentence that played on the Finnish word ‘sinisilmäinen,’ which translates literally to blue-eyed and figuratively to gullible and naive.

“We mustn’t be so blue-eyed that soon we won’t be blue-eyed,” the removed part read according to the public broadcaster.

Minister of Justice Leena Meri (PS) in February stated on YLE A-studio that the National Coalition’s readiness to double the number of work permits granted to non-EU citizens indicates a readiness to replace the population.

Minister of Finance Riikka Purra (PS) argued on Facebook in 2019 that talk about population replacement is not an exaggeration, pointing to a projection about the share of native-born population in Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

“I haven’t acquainted myself with conspiracy theories of the far right that deal with population replacement, and I’m not planning on doing so,” she wrote. “When I talk about an increase in the number of immigrants and foreigners, about population change, turnover, replacement, variation and the kind, I’m referring to a fact depicted in this graph, for example.”

Purra was at the time the first deputy chairperson of the Finns Party.

Meri, Purra and Rantanen on Sunday all tweeted that they do not believe in conspiracy theories. “I’ll state this to be clear: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I also don’t believe in the replacement theory,” wrote Rantanen.

Her response seemed to leave it open to interpretation whether she believes the replacement theory to be a conspiracy theory.

Niko Pyrhönen, a researcher who has specialised in populism and conspiracy theories at the University of Helsinki, on Sunday told YLE that Rantanen has probably employed the term deliberately.

“She chooses and specifically employs the term ‘väestönvaihto,’ which is one of the few that are linked to conspiracy theories and serve as a dog whistle,” he stated.

The Finnish Security Intelligence Service (Supo) has noted that the great replacement is associated with ethnic nationalism, an ideology rooted in the notion of preserving the ethnic uniformity of society. Supo highlighted in its yearbook for 2020 that the theory has been one of the most noteworthy ideological drivers of far-right terrorists.

“This conspiracy theory framework rests on the idea that immigration and multiculturalism pose a fundamental threat to the western white population,” it wrote.

Source: Many Finns Party ministers have pointed to replacement theory

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